Alumni News: Dr Joyce Singano profile and upcoming events

The department would like to extend our congratulations to Joyce on the award of this prestigious medal.

Joyce Singano is a foraminiferal palaeontologist from Tanzania who carried out her PhD at UCL under the supervision of Prof. Fred Banner. She has spent her career at the Tanzania Petroleum Development Corporation (TPDC) in Dar es Salaam, where she set up her own laboratory from scratch and became the first professional micropalaentologist in Tanzania. Her laboratory at TPDC became one of the foremost in Africa and continues to thrive today. Most of her work has been applied, and therefore remains unpublished, but her work within the international Tanzania Drilling Project (TDP) underpinned the success of that research project and she has 12 published papers (many with UCL researchers Paul Bown and Bridget Wade) with almost 1500 citations to date, which undoubtedly represents a substantial body of outstanding research. Read the full article.

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Although not strictly an alumnus, George Bellas Greenough FRS FGS, played an important role in the establishment of both UCL and the Geological Society, and so he is a founding father of UCL Earth Sciences. This year sees the bicentenary of the publication of Greenough’s Geological Map of England and Wales and the History of Geology Group (HOGG) of the Geological Society had intended to hold a special meeting at UCL in May to celebrate this. Because of the pandemic, it was not possible to hold this meeting as planned, but it is now hoped that it will happen in May 2021. The details are yet to be finalised, but this meeting will now very probably be online, via Zoom etc. One advantage of a virtual meeting, of course, is that there should be plenty of space available for UCL Earth Sciences alumni to attend if they wish to do so. We shall circulate details of how to attend as soon as they become available, or you can look at the HOGG website.   
In the meantime, however, would you like to own a replica of the Greenough map? Duncan Hawley (UCL alumnus and Chair of HOGG) has told me that the BGS has just issued its version of the Greenough Map. This is a full-size reproduction, retailing at the modest price of £39. It comes in a slip case and is accompanied by the memoir and a simple introductory preface written by Duncan.

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If you visit the “Alumni” section of our Departmental website you will see that we now feature profiles of three alumni: Terry Cotton (BSc 1969), Roberto Bugiolacchi (BSc 1999, PhD 2006) and Grace Campbell (MSci 2010). It would be nice to have some more profiles and, in particular, to be able to “fill in the decades” with profiles of graduates from the 1970s, and 1980s. If you would like to contribute a profile – don’t be shy! - please contact Ian Wood

This newsletter would normally have contained a report on the Alumni Dinner in November 2020. Due to the pandemic, of course, this year’s event had to be cancelled but we hope to be back on track in November 2021, and we look forward to welcoming our alumni back to the Department then.

Any alumni who would like to come back to visit the Department, or who would be willing to speak (online or in person) about their careers to our current students would be very welcome; just email Ian Wood (ian.wood@ucl.ac.uk) to arrange to come.

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